Momfidence: Help Encourage Learning

Creative tools and toys that engage your child's imagination

Who could be happier than a fat-legged toddler exploring the glories of a spring day: the tickly grass to roll on, a waxy crocus to touch, a mesmerizing squirrel, and ooh, what's this…?

"Henry! Put that down!" my mother-in-law shrieks across the lawn in a tone I've never heard her use before with her golden grandson. It's a poison ivy and broken glass tone. A tone for copperheads.

"Put down that stick!" Mima clarifies as she marches over to take away the offending object. Sticks in the hands of little boys and girls trigger WMD-level alarms in certain adults. At the Montessori Henry would later attend, the kids were taught to toss any sticks they found over the fence and out of reach. "A stick is an accident waiting to happen," a friend of mine used to say each time she confiscated one. (Which was often, since there was a virtual forest in her backyard.)

In fact, the much bigger risk is that your child won't get enough stick play. Brain building, not safety, is at stake here.

If there's a silver lining to the black economy, it's the reminder that little minds can indeed flourish without game consoles, handheld video players and monthly memberships to virtual worlds. Frankly, given these choices, the best thing for a growing brain is probably the crummy stick.

Open-ended playthings—that is, objects that can be whatever you decide they are—are the unsung heroes of childhood. They invite exactly the kind of experimenting and imitating that help neurons in children's brains make the connections that are the foundation of learning and language.

Here's why they're so great. One day Henry watched Mickey Mouse in The Sorcerer's Apprentice. The next afternoon I found him outside waving a stick in front of a flower bed as if he were leading an orchestra. He'd never seen an actual conductor before, but his brain absorbed and applied the concept in a different setting with just one exposure. Called "fast mapping," this same process is how kids' vocabularies explode.

My little conductor was also engaging in something called "symbolic play"—to him, the stick was no longer a piece of wood from a tree. It was a baton. Tomorrow it might be a sword or a little boat in a creek. Such thinking now encourages abstract thinking and the ability to see things from different perspectives later.

We've all seen this. In fact, when the lowly stick was named to the Toy Hall of Fame last year (along with the skateboard and the baby doll), I listed on my Momfidence blog 15 different ways I'd seen my kids play with this freebie "toy." Within hours, moms from all over added 40 more marvelous uses they'd witnessed: magic wand, light saber, hockey stick, microphone, twirling baton, baby doll, baseball bat, balance beam, fishing pole, spoon, queen's scepter, javelin, finish line…

All of the great outdoors is basically one big toy box. When I was a kid, six hundred miles from most of our toys on summer vacation at our grandmother's house, my sister and I would spend hours playing "kitchen" at the lake across the street. Specialties of the house: peanut brittle (wafers of cracked mud) and coffee (watery mud running from a trench dug
to the shore).

That's why I was sad to see a big new fence enclosing my kids' elementary school playground. "It's to make sure nobody runs off," my daughter informed me. I had to wonder how many times in its 50-year history the school had actually lost pupils in the skimpy clusters of trees that sit just beyond the playground. The real reason, I suppose, is liability.

The tragedy is that the fencing cuts off kids from the thing that's the most fun: those side woods and brush. Sure, you have to watch out for poison ivy and scrapes. But that's where the forts are! Ingenious forts, meticulously constructed out of sticks, with their own rules of conduct and rituals for raiding the other forts. (Fort building is actually a behavior seen in children around the world—they're made of shrubs, snow, sand, whatever's local.)

My daughter once got in trouble for defending her fort with a makeshift bow and arrow. She hadn't hurt anyone—the thing was nearly too primitive to work—though it was construed as a terrible threat. But I couldn't muster the least bit of anger with her. To the contrary, I was quite proud of her ingenuity.